Withered Harvest

The United Farmworkers union and its founder, Cesar Chavez, have been revered by many since they first began organizing in the 1960s. I remember boycotting grapes through the 1970s on their behalf. But in her four-part investigative series, "UFW: A Broken Contract," Miriam Pawel of the Los Angeles Times digs deeply into the union's current state of affairs and finds much that has turned rotten. This is a richly reported story that uses data from union and government documents and plentiful examples from the fields to trace what went wrong. Here's a link to the third part of the series. The fourth part comes out tomorrow.
www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-history10jan10,0,3382590.story?track=tottext,0,7810402.story?track=tothtml